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We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket). We’re making the transfer real simple, and with a couple clicks we’ll automatically move your photos to Flickr or wherever you want them. You can also download your original-resolution photos back to your computer, or buy an archive CD from our featured partner (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only). All you need to do is tell us what to do with your photos before we close, after which any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted and no longer accessible.….

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. – a personal knowledge management tool …

The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList.com. Within the next three years online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies like Backflip, Blink,Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, and others entering the market. Lacking viable models for making money, most of this early generation of social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst.— Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking, (2007)
The main features of any social bookmarking tool are

centralized storage and availability of web links (i.e., accessible from most any computer with internet connection)

the ability to organize web links in some way (tagging, categorizing, bundling, descriptions, etc.)

ease of use (little or no coding experience needed)

discovery (e.g., the ability to share, recommend, or discover web links from other users)

A few popular social bookmarking tools include:

CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/) saves citation details, exports them in a few different formats, and aggregates journal articles. Sometimes called the “del.icio.us for the academic world”.

del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking tool that allows users to save, recommend, and share bookmarks through networks. Users can bundle (categorize) web links as well as assign tags (keywords). Links can be publicly shared or private. A GIL record can be tagged in del.icio.us.

Digg (http://digg.com/) is similar to both del.icio.us and pageflakes in that it is social bookmarking. Digg provides categories as a controlled entry point and allows users to rate articles.

furl (http://furl.net) is a social bookmarking site website that allows users to store searchable copies of websites; additionally users can share their website copies.

PennTags (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) is social bookmarking for the University of Pennsylvania’s catalog. An example of a record tagged in PennTags catalog (a Voyager catalog!)

Pines/Evergreen is anticipating tagging as a Fall 2007 enhancement; OCLC’s Worldcat.org also has social bookmarking on their list of future enhancements.

StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) is a toolbar feature which allows for user recommendations and metadata entry (descriptions, etc.), and random discovery.

..and expanding beyond bookmarking…

Nines (http://www.nines.org/index.html) uses Collex “a collections and exhibits tool for the remixable web, to aggregate peer-reviewed online scholarship and allow you to collect, annotate, and share it with students and colleagues” and have partnered with libraries such as University of Virginia.

Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/) is an ajax driven site that allows a user to pull in and share multiple kinds of rss feeds and web sites including del.icio.us links, news sites, blogs, and more. pageflakes is actively developing its service to give users more features and greater functionality without sacrificing ease of use. To see a pageflake pulling in UGA’s library content: http://www.pageflakes.com/georgiawebgurl/Netvibe (http://www.netvibes.com) is an ajax driven site that allows a user to pull in and share multiple kinds of rss feeds including del.icio.us links, news sites, blogs, and more. netvibes was a little earlier than pageflakes in development.

LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) is a organizational service for materials such as personal libraries which provides means to organize, share, and discover resources. LibraryThing has recently developed widgets for use by libraries. Two academic libraries are testing.